The Bronx Zoo is back

“They don’t think it be like it is, but it do.”

That was Oscar Gamble’s assessment of Yankee Stadium in 1979. The new Yankee Stadium hasn’t sunk to those depths, mostly thanks to seats costing around first class international travel prices and the general shift of all live crowds at sporting events skewing more wine and cheese while the actual fans are pushed either to the severely thin air upstairs or out of the stadium altogether. Hasn’t helped that Yankees fans haven’t been all that enamored with their team of late.

There probably is a treatise to be written about how the temperature of our current society — the entitlement and the boorishness in all facets — being best exemplified in the places we gather en masse. We’ve seen more incidents of fans and players clashing in various forms. Just this week there was the Mensa meeting of Kyrie Irving and Celtics fans. After being locked down for two years, more and more are feeling their oats when back outside and in revelry.

Or it could be that Yankees fans are just raging assholes:

This had started a few minutes earlier, when a few bleacher creatures were taunting Cleveland’s Steven Kwan after he’d crashed into the wall chasing a Kiner-Falefa double that tied the game in the bottom of the ninth. Whatever was said crossed the line enough that both of the other Guardians’ outfielders, Myles Straw and Oscar Mercado, confronted whatever rock person had something too much to say.

After Gleyber Torres ended the game in the next at-bat, trash and full beers were thrown at the Guardians’ outfielders, to the point where the Yankees had to cut short their celebration and instead head out to right field to demand their moronic supporters cut it out. All in all, a pretty sorry sight.

Whenever this happens there’s a rush to scream “A few bad apples!” You can bet your bottom dollar the demographic of those throwing shit on the field and those who scream that very line in much more serious arenas are an exact match, and you’re forgetting the rest of the idiom: “...ruin the whole bunch.” There’s been no word that the other fans in right field were calling the throwers out to security, nor yet have the Yankees themselves said they’ve identified them. Hopefully soon. We’re only as good as our weakest, or dumbest, links. We learn that lesson every day.

It’ll all be sloughed off as the combination of one of the first nice days in New York, drunks in the sun, etc. Hopefully it’s an isolated incident at Yankee Stadium, though we can probably expect something else somewhere else soon.

There is no excuse for whatever this is:

Bud, you can’t simulate the idea of beer-boiled bratwurst by treating your $27 beer in the Bronx as some sort of cocktail sauce for your assuredly underwhelming dog. It’s hard to imagine the mindset of spending the $30 on a beer and a dog or whatever ransom it costs there only to ruin both. Have you ever thought, “Mmm, this beer is good, but what it could really use is a tinge of a mustard finish?”

I now fully expect some New York brewery to come up with a hot dog IPA, and the most annoying person you know will tell you it’s actually really good. Whenever society truly collapses, if we’re not already there, historians will know the roots of it from yesterday at The Boogey Down.